WANTED: Sponsorship-Procurement Help From NHRA

• By Susan Wade
• Posted on June 24, 2019

Remember wind-up dolls? Tami Powers said she feel like one.

Powers, director of business development/operations at Alan Johnson Racing, is soldiering on after a heartbreaking 11th-hour collapse of an inspiring and intriguing deal for NHRA Top Fuel racer Ashley Sanford. Powers, like Sanford, continues to move forward, promoting the sport that Powers says “rocks my frickin’ soul.”

But she says she needs some help from the NHRA.

“I will go out into the battlefield by myself again and again and again if I have to. But it would be so much more helpful if the NHRA could change something to where they could learn from the people who are super-successful at this and be open to learning new strategies. That’s what we need as teams,” Powers says.

Powers’ strategy is to build relationships with potential investors, to learn what their needs are, to find what interests them, to listen to their goals, then follow up with a tailored program that will deliver their corporate cravings. Along the way, it is her practice to ask, “What is your perception of the NHRA?”

And she says, “The feedback that I get is ‘Oh, NHRA is a great value. It’s diverse. You’re doing well with attendance.’ Then when it comes down to it, they say, ‘The NHRA is kind of in their own little bubble. They do things their own way. It’s the same old situation.’

“For instance,’ Powers says, “I’m talking to everyone about investing in and partnering with our sport with 12-time Top Fuel champion team owner Alan Johnson. I’ve got a slew of assets here. People get excited about it, about next-generation drivers like Ashley Sanford, who has a social-media presence just under [that of] championship racers who are out there every weekend. This girl hasn’t gotten a ride yet, and she has the social-media presence of professional drivers who have been out there for years. Yet this girl is not sponsored. I got everybody excited about Ashley Sanford, everybody excited about Alan Johnson, everybody excited about our robust race program and how we’re going to reach the next generation of underserved kids in rural areas and how we’re going to educate them in engineering. Everybody’s excited, major brands, and then they look at the NHRA and they look at the data and they go, ‘Uh, we’re going to pass.’”

She has discovered the answer to the question “How do you prod the NHRA to be the helpful partner you need it to be for you?”

Powers simply says, “You don’t – unless you have people leading the teams, the marketing and PR teams at NHRA, unless you have someone who’s a killer marketing person with a ton of connections who can shine up the NHRA to where people look at it and say, ‘Wow! How can we get in?’”

Therein, she says, lies the problem: “To have an honest and authentic conversation about that with the NHRA is a challenge. It’s a challenge. It’s like you wind up that little doll and she starts walking against the wall and she just keeps walking against the wall and walking against the wall. You feel like you can’t penetrate it. And that’s super-frustrating, because you work really hard on your end to bring in some new eyes, some new bodies, some new excitement and one mainstream brand and” – in her most recent case – “it fell short at the end. We hit every hot-button item that they [marketing candidates] wanted to deliver. We could deliver for them. And it was an NHRA problem at the end of the day.

“That’s the elephant in the room. And if we don’t talk about it, things are never going to change,” Powers says.

“There is a positive to this,” she says. “The good news about sponsorship is this: The facts are the NHRA is the greatest value in motorsports in the entire world, period. NHRA is the most diverse, competitive motorsport in the world. From Jr. Dragster all the way up to Top Fuel, there’s nothing in the world like it. It’s the only sport where men and women compete side by side on a professional level on an even platform. And the women win, as well as the men. And it’s not a big surprise, because we have great women drivers. We have great athletes in our sport.

“The bad news is you can have all these great assets, but if you don’t know how to activate them and you don’t know how to connect with people and you don’t know how to build relationships in the corporate world, it’s all moot,” Powers says. “And that’s what I’m trying to change.”

Powers emphasizes that she’s not trying to quarrel with the sanction body, that she only wants to see mutual cooperation that will make racing more affordable, bring more fresh sponsors to the mix, and therefore put more teams on the racetrack consistently.

“I don’t want to form a hate relationship with them [NHRA executives]. I want to form a collective discussion and an honest conversation – as tough as it might be, as contentious as it might be – an authentic connection to solve solvable problems. That’s all. That’s it,” Powers says.

“All these things I’m saying have nothing to do with Alan Johnson and everything to do with my experience over the last three and a half years being out here, huffing and puffing and meetings and proposals and board meetings and Ashley and I running all over Hell and back,” she says.

“I’ve never seen anyone work harder and be more dedicated and more even-keeled emotionally than Ashley Sanford. This girl has gotten her ass handed to her so many times,” Powers says. Following this latest disappointment, Powers recalls Sanford being resilient: “This girl dusted herself off and said, ‘What do we do next?’ The girl’s slinging huge sandwiches at a deli, and she’s been doing it for years. She goes in there, and she makes her money. And everybody asks her, ‘When are you going to go out racing?’ every single time she delivers one of those sandwiches. Can you imagine that? And this girl keeps her chin up and a smile on her face and has faith. She has the strongest faith I’ve ever seen. She keeps her composure. She doesn’t lose it. She’s so focused and knows what she wants. And she knows it’s attainable. But there are so many roadblocks, and there’s no help – no help – from the NHRA. None at all.”

Sanford isn’t the only racer who inspires Powers.

Pro Stock and Pro Modified racer Alex Laughlin drew raves from Powers.

“At PRI last year, Alex Laughlin put on his own sponsorship summit at a hotel in Indianapolis. He did all the invites, all the food, all the drinks, arranged it with the hotel. The guy’s busier than a one-armed paper-hanger as it is. He put together his own sponsorship summit. In no other sport does anybody do that. It’s the entity where you compete (league or sanction body) that does these types of things,” she says. “This guy invited everybody he knew in the area – a brand, a company, a marketing director, CEOs, COOs, CMOs – and he put on the event himself with his own money. Somebody doesn’t go to a sponsorship summit and go, ‘Oh, my god, I want to buy in.’ But what he did do is he planted some seeds. He started a foundation and started building those relationships.”

The bigger question is why does Laughlin have to do that? Shouldn’t the sanction body be sowing the seeds?

Instead, Powers says, “the NHRA will say to us, ‘Well, you guys are charging too much for partnerships. You guys are too expensive. Maybe if you weren’t asking for $4 million, you’d get something.’”

Granted, some costs of doing business in motorsports are beyond the NHRA’s control. It has no leverage when it comes to hotel rates, gasoline and diesel fuel to transport the race cars, airfares, rental cars, and non-industry expenses. Its Technical Committee has been working with teams to maximize the life of parts, and in March, it cooperated with PRO to avoid a crisis centered on the rising cost of racing fuel. However, Powers and others in her position feel nothing but demoralized when the sanction body scolds them for trying to satisfy a budget that’s reasonable, given realistic prices in today’s marketplace.

“If you look at our Top Fuel budget, it’s not like everybody’s getting rich off this. We just want to race,” Powers says. “Alan Johnson knows we want to be out there competing. He knows that there’s a great school of next-generation drivers. ‘We Engineer Champions’ – that’s our slogan. We can do that as long as A.J. can be out there and can be funded. We can make magic happen. But we need money to do it.”

Another racer who amazes Powers is Leah Pritchett, who twice this season has had to ask friend John Schnatter (aka “Papa John”) to fund her Don Schumacher Racing dragster because she has cobbled together deals for most races but not all of them. And Pritchett has had her share of setbacks because of financial woes to team owners before this year.

“Ohmygosh – Leah Pritchett is a machine. This girl has more frickin’ gall. She’s amazing,” Powers says. “And it’s people like Ashley, people like Leah, people like Antron Brown out there working his ass off . . . Antron Brown is so inspiring to me. I feed off of these people. I look at what they’re doing – I look at Alex Laughlin – and going, ‘I’m taking some of their mojo today, because I need it.’ The inspiration from these people is what keeps me going. You know that we’re going to get there. I know we’re going to get there.”

She says, “I just wish that we could collectively come together and work together to have the difficult conversations, have the arguments, but get something done and solve these solvable problems. The momentum has stalled, as far as having our new television package. The show is depleted in Top Fuel. Not to take away from everybody who’s doing a great job out there, but we don’t have enough cars. That’s just a fact. And we need to talk about that. We need to talk about how to solve these problems.

“It’s about relationships. And when you have an entity where you’re getting a lot of feedback from these people who hold the keys to these brands and they’re saying, ‘Well, the NHRA’s kind of in its own little bubble,’ that, to me, says that there’s a weak link somewhere where they’re unable to form those types of business relationships and build that trust and show what they can do for the brand and bring those people in and repay them. There’s something broken over there [at the NHRA headquarters at Glendora, Calif.],” Powers says.

When egos can be shelved, when the NHRA can recognize it doesn’t need to be at odds or in competition with its own racing teams, the sport can take advantage of its quick-paced, instant-gratification appeal to the younger crowd both sides want to woo.